I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

Obama's War On Drilling: Oil Surplus, Not Scarcity, Is The New Regulatory Excuse

Dan Kish has more than 25 years of legislative and policy experience on Capitol Hill. He has been directly involved in all major energy issues before the Congress, including the comprehensive Energy Policy Acts of 1992 and 2005. Dan served for six years as the Chief of Staff on the Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and in senior energy policy positions in both House and Senate committees, including co-directing the Speaker’s Task Force on Affordable Natural Gas.

This interview with Dan Kish, Senior Vice President of the Institute for Energy Research in Washington, D.C., reveals that regardless of abundance and necessity, the Obama administration continues to justify new regulations that restrict access to America’s oil and gas reserves.

Larry Bell: Dan, it wasn’t so very long ago, back in June 2010, when President Obama said: “With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices…Not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil.” Yet according to government data compiled by the Institute for Energy Research, North America’s land areas contain twice the combined proved oil reserves of all OPEC nations, and enough natural gas to provide for our electricity needs at current usage rates for more than 500 years.

So how has the Obama administration’s energy policy changed since we now appear to have the advantage of that enormous abundance?

Dan Kish: Larry, the policy hasn’t really changed at all. In fact, the U.S. Treasury Department makes it very clear that they now regard oil and gas production as a problem. In each of the annual budget proposals they have sent to Congress, the Treasury Department calls for higher taxes on domestic oil gas and coal. Their remarkable reasoning is that unless taxes are raised, it will encourage the overproduction of oil gas and coal! For suffering motorists and families and businesses struggling to pay their energy bills, this is a cruel policy.

It’s very apparent that the real intent is to make oil and gas more expensive in order to make the heavily subsidized, unreliable and costly ”renewable” energy programs they are pushing more cost-competitive. This is the Tonya Harding approach to energy… break your opponent’s kneecap if you can’t win fair and square.

This blatant playing-field-tipping strategy, where government picks winners and losers, permeates virtually all aspects of the Obama administration’s energy policy. We don’t have an energy problem, Larry. We have a government problem … a government that is deliberately, and by its own admission, striving to make energy much more expensive for American citizens and job-producing industries.

Larry: What tactics are the various agencies applying to implement this policy?

Dan: There are many, and they are distributed among many government agencies. For example, in attacking coal, a new EPA regulation will ban the construction of any new coal plants. Other regulatory rulings being contemplated will effectively close most or all of the existing coal plants in the United States. The U.S. coal industry is already under great economic pressure from abundant and inexpensive natural gas which will continue to replace coal for power and heating. Enormous shale gas resources that are being developed in places like the Barnett in Texas and the Marsalis in Pennsylvania are having a huge impact, but that does not mean our nation, with the largest supplies of coal in the world, should deny ourselves its use and become overly reliant on one energy source that the government could then regulate out of business. That is, in a word, stupid.

Larry: Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has dramatically changed the economic picture in many regions of the country. While individual states are supposed to have regulatory control over these processes, the EPA and other agencies seem determined to leverage authority on the basis of water safety issues through various regulatory devices. Please comment on this situation.

Dan: Based upon factual evidence that has been accrued over 60 years involving more than one million U.S. wells, this makes no sense. Even former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted that there’s never been a proven case of groundwater contamination caused by fracking.

Larry, as a Texan and frequent writer on this topic who is familiar with the oil and gas business, I’m sure you know that today’s practices are even much better than those 60 years ago. Yet people in Washington still attempt to conjure up a problem that hasn’t been evidenced in six decades to justify seizures of more powers from local and state governments. Agencies are looking at everything from groundwater pollution to earthquakes risks, trying to figure out a creative new way to squeeze the federal government’s camel nose under the tent of a world-changing energy revolution.

Fracking is largely responsible for a new natural gas miracle. But if the federal government is successful in these power grabs, that miracle will likely end, representing a disastrous loss of economic and job opportunities, not only for the states containing that great resource treasure, but for the entire nation.

The Department of Interior which controls permits for drilling on federal onshore lands and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is also exerting a big influence upon fracking operations. To give you an idea how difficult it is to get federal government land permitting approval versus states, consider the difference in time schedules. Under the Obama administration, the time required for a permit has doubled to 307 days, while in North Dakota, where booming oil shale fracking has effectively wiped out unemployment, permitting currently takes only 10 days.

There should be no wonder that all of the states that regulate permitting are fighting efforts of the government to interfere.

Texas, for example, which has permitted more wells than any other state, has more real knowledge about the geology, hydrology, and impacts of oil and gas development than the federal government will ever gain.

Larry: President Obama made a big pitch during his January 24, 2012 State of the Union Address that oil production was at the highest point in eight years. I’ll bet that you will have some comments to offer on that!

Dan: Yes, that claim certainly deserves some serious scrutiny.

Even though the federal government, between its onshore and offshore lands, owns more acreage than all private and state lands in the U.S. combined, last August the Congressional Research Service found that 96% of the increased production in oil over the last five years came from those private and state lands. Thanks to current government policies, only the very largest companies can survive the bureaucratic and legal hassles of operating on federal lands. Although they belong to taxpayers, regulators behave as if they are the king’s lands and waters, which no one dare touch.

Larry: So all that good news about energy abundance isn’t being received as joyously by the Obama administration and its regulatory bureaucracies as we might have hoped?

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